English Language Arts Skills and Instruction: Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations Published in "Dissertation Abstracts International," July through December 1981 (Vol. 42 Nos. 1 through 6).

ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, Urbana, IL.

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 36 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) distancing in young children's stories; (2) the effects of verbal and visual elaborations on the learning of abstract concepts; (3) the effects of underlined cues, advance organizers, and post organizers on meaningful prose learning; (4) planning and implementing a junior high school gifted program for language arts/social studies; (5) simultaneous computer-delivered audiovisual word cuing; (6) imagination and environmental cues in young children's verbal creativity; (7) elective English in secondary schools; (8) phonemic analysis, concrete operations, and reading an alphabetic script; (9) the effect of pictures on the acquisition of isolated sight words; (10) the relation of media to English instruction; (11) spelling reform for the English language; (12) the effects of spelling games on the spelling achievement of elementary school students; (13) lexicogrammatical and behavioral forms that code time and space; (14) the relationship of sociocultural distance to the reading and writing skills of community college basic skills students; and (15) the effects of various writing tools on the handwriting legibility of first grade students. (FL)